What to Watch…
Secrets We Keep on Netflix is a six-part drama about rich people in Denmark. A couple’s young housekeeper from the Philippines goes missing, and suspicions focus on the employer family, and their next door neighbours. Not bad. The acting is a bit wooden—but the portrayal of immigrants as domestic servants is jarring. Trailer’s here.
I just watched the 1985 film The Official Story on Kanopy. It’s a drama about the time of a fascist regime or the time of “the generals”in Argentina. Often called a “dirty war” it was from 1976 to 1983.
A bourgeois couple in Buenos Aires dote on their adorable five-year-old girl, Gaby. The girl was adopted by the couple right from the hospital, or so Roberto, the husband –a wealthy lawyer — tells his wife Alicia, a high school teacher. For years she believed him. It was an open secret that the Argentinian government kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of leftist professors, students and trade unionists—whom the government called “subversives.” What was less known was that the regime scooped up the dead subversives’ babies and toddlers and gave them away to friends of the military, the police, and those who helped the regime. Alicia suspects Gaby was stolen. Here’s the trailer and it’s very much worth watching. It won the prize for Best Foreign Language Film at the 58th Academy Awards.
The Affair on CBC-GEM, is a six-episode series. Made from 2014-19 there are five seasons, but only one available now it seems. A happy-go-lucky father of four children starts a secret, casual affair with a waitress in cottage country in New York state. He, his wife and children are visiting in-laws when Noah (Dominic West) decides on a bit of harmless fun with Alison (Ruth Wilson). The series is slow, but it is well put together and at times there is even suspense. The best part is the scene when Noah has an argument with Alison in a seedy hotel room. He kicks the bureau and damages it. So he and Alison decide to switch it with the undamaged one in the hotel room next door. Trailer’s here.
On Netflix, you could watch Department Q. The 9-part thriller series takes place in Edinburgh. DCI Morck, who has a short fuse and plenty of enemies among his superiors in the police, is assigned to look into cold cases. His new “office” is the grimy basement of the police station, beside discarded desks, broken urinals and beneath swinging bare light bulbs. The case he and his team investigate is four years old. A top Crown prosecutor went missing and is presumed dead. The acting is good, the plot, though a bit far-fetched, all works out and you can’t guess who “did” it. Trailer is here.
Netflix airs the haunting but rather long new documentary Grenfell Uncovered. In 2017, more than 70 people were killed in a fire in Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey high rise building in a trendy area of London, England. Though the building dated back to the 1970s, it had recently been “improved” with an outside cladding of what turned out to be extremely flammable lined aluminum tiles. The 120-apartment building was owned and operated by the local council, but the council did next to nothing to ensure repairs were safe. The building housed new immigrants, pensioners and many families; the council was dismissive and racist in how they maintained the building. The doc will not leave you humming. Here’s the trailer.
The Brutalist (2024) is a bit over the top. You need to like watching a melancholy Holocaust survivor make good in America. This is what happens in the film. Adrien Brody plays a Jewish Hungarian architect, Laszlo Toth, who manages to get into the US in the wake of WWII (World War II). He can’t get his professional credentials immediately recognised, and takes all sorts of poorly paying even dangerous jobs to make money to bring his wife, and their niece to the US. He’s a “good” immigrant; he even pals around with a Black man he meets on a construction job. Finally he gets a chance to design and build a library for a taciturn and corrupt millionaire. Toth’s hard work finally gets noticed, but certain things in his life still go very wrong. Here’s the trailer.
The Glass Dome (Netflix) is a 2025 thriller series from Sweden. A woman criminologist experiences her own childhood trauma when she was (of course) abducted as a girl and imprisoned in a glass bubble! As she investigates another girl’s very scary disappearance, the ups and downs of the search are rather formulaic. So-so. Yawn. Bad acting, top heavy script, the trailer is here.
The Sense of an Ending on Kanopy is a nicely done 2017 drama from the BBC. Taken from a novel of the same name by Julian Barnes, the film revolves around Tony, a retired man who is lonely and looking for minor adventures. He receives a legal letter to announce he has inherited 500 pounds and a diary from a woman whose daughter he dated in high school. There was a teen pregnancy, there was a suicide, there were estranged parents – all the drama that goes into a pot boiler. This is a cut above, here is the trailer.
Deconstructing Karen on CBC-GEM, is a delightful 45 min. documentary. “You are cordially invited to the most radically honest dinner of your life,” begins the trailer –I was hooked. here it is. Eight white American women pay to have dinner with the two female co-owners of the business Race2Dinner. The hosts talk bluntly about race, and why insisting you “don’t see race” when looking at person of colour, is a form of racism. This doc is riveting, cringeworthy and great!!
The Pretendians (2024) is also on CBC-GEM is worth seeing. You can watch it here. Drew Hayden Taylor, an Anishinaabe writer and humorist, leads us through the recent “scandals” of white people who insist they are Indigenous when they are not. Taylor looks at issues around identity, power and myth. A good even entertaining doc to watch!! trailer is here.
You could watch the 2025 doc Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem – the story of Rob Ford, drug addict and now deceased mayor of Toronto. Some of it is shocking, to remember what went on at city council meetings a mere 11 years ago – but most of it is rather turgid, and even a bit boring. When we see where politicians have landed all of us today – moving right at break neck speed—maybe Ford was the test case. Trailer’s here
What to Read…
Read The World After Gaza (2025), by Pankaj Mishra. Mishra is a writer originally from India; he looks at what is going on in Gaza, and the lives of the Palestinians in ways and through a lens we (in Canada) don’t. He weaves history, some philosophy and left-wing politics into a fascinating, very readable critique of Israel and its powerful chums.
I found two John Grisham books– that were new to me. I borrowed both as audiobooks from Halifax Public Libraries. I listened to Gray Mountain. I got to say, Grisham’s books that have women as protagonists tend to fall flat. His descriptions of women characters run from beautiful and talented lawyers, all slim, and well-dressed to plain women who crusade to change the world – tough, moderate drinkers and usually unhappy in love. In Gray Mountain it is the 2008 recession, and hundreds of lawyers are being laid off from major firms in New York City. Samantha is a young, corporate lawyer at a big firm. Both her parents are lawyers; she says she grew up in luxury. When she is laid off, the company offers a chance for rehiring in a year as long as she volunteers her legal skills full time at a free legal clinic or charity during the intervening 12 months. She lands an intern’s job in a legal aid clinic in rural Virginia. There she meets a local lawyer who has been fighting for justice for former coal miners who suffer from the lethal black lung disease, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis. Samantha who has no previous social justice background, takes to this cause. The book reads a bit like a soap-opera, but the parts about black lung and the long-suffering miners is persuasive.
I also listened to The Associate, a superior book to Gray Mountain, also by Grisham. Kyle is a 25-year-old freshly minted lawyer from Yale Law School. He was the top law student and edited the prestigious Yale Law School Review. His dad is a lawyer in a small town who does a “main street” practice on his own – criminal law, wills, workers’ comp claims and litigation. He encouraged Kyle to devote his first few years to legal work with a social justice bent, rather than work for a corporate law firm. But Kyle is blackmailed and pushed to join New York’s biggest law firm as a spy. In this novel, four young college men are accused of raping a co-ed at a frat house party. What happens to the four and the young woman is eerily similar to the current case involving the five former junior hockey players on trial for rape in London, Ont. The Associate is a good read.
Ars Gratia Artis…
A climate activist from the environmental group Last Generation Canada threw pink paint on a painting by Pablo Picasso at the Musée de Beaux Arts in Montreal …. The Picasso was protected by glass, so no harm was done to the painting, L’Hetéire. L’Hetaire or Le Courtisane au Collier in English translates as a well-educated courtesan.
You can hear Marc justify why environmentalists are targetting a painting in an environmental crisis. This reminds me of Mary Richardson, a Canadian suffragette who lived in London UK at the turn of the 20th century. 101 years ago, Mary slashed the Rokeby Venus in Britain’s National Gallery on Trafalgar Square — to draw attention to the lack of rights for women. Read about it here.
Left; Mary being arrested, London UK. Rokeby Venus by Diego Valazquez (Spanish c.1650)
Of course there is a more recent case of an angry museum-goer destroying part of an exhibition. The Chinese tourist smashed two ancient terracotta warriors in the display of thousands of life-size warriors from 3rd century China. The Terracotta Army is a UNESCO World Heritage Site — read more here.
Maclean’s magazine ran a very nicely written piece by Elizaveta Tarnarutckaia, Canadian Books Made Me Canadian. Tarnarutckaia is Russian woman who emigrated with her husband to Calgary in the last few years. She writes about how poets and writers are highly valued in her homeland — more than 100 cities are named after writer. That is lacking here — what does it say about Canadian culture? She writes well — delightful.
Nota Bene:
Greenpeace activists made this banner to condemn Jeff Bezos for “buying Venice” for his wedding party in Venice, last weekend. Apparently, 90 private jets landed with the 200 guests (top 1%ers). Bezos rented Venice (!) for $30 million; festivities cost another $20 million. The actual wedding happened earlier but this was the party — imagine Bezos and his bride who know nothing about culture, Italy, or public opinion, and care less (i.e. conditions of Amazon workers) take over a major European city.
Trump tells us not to worry about the effects of the tariffs he’s imposed. According to Trump, girls don’t need 30 dolls (presumably made in China and subject to tariffs) when two will do. And any more than five pencils — are not required. Watch Trump’s incredible 36 second sound byte . The same goes for pencils, according to Trump. Aboard Air Force One on 4 May, he said,
“A young lady – 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl – doesn’t need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.”
Here’s a picture of just one such Palestinian girl with her doll under her right arm. Below, Sila Madi, 8, lies in her hospital bed, as she receives treatment at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 26 May 2025. Sila’s right leg was amputated and her left leg is at risk of amputation due to an Israeli attack that injured several other members of her family.
Above: Firas Wishah, and Sila Madi, aged 8, with doll.
Firas Wishah, 40, lives in a tent erected atop the ruins of his destroyed home in al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. Photographed on 3 May 2025, Wishah lost 18 members of his family in an Israeli airstrike that targeted their home. He continues to search through the rubble for the bodies of other relatives still missing beneath the debris. Among the few things he has salvaged are his children’s dolls and toys, which he has placed outside the tent — a small attempt to preserve the memory of those he lost. (credit for both photos: Moaz Abu Taha/APA Images)
Podcasts for you…
Missing in the Amazon: is a seven episode podcast made by The Guardian in Australia. Three years ago, an experienced British journalist and an Indigenous land defender disappeared in a remote area of Brazil. Another journalist tracked down what happened – and it’s not a pretty story. Listen to it here.
Three years ago, Erin Patterson a woman who lives near Victoria, Australia, invited her ex-husband’s parents and his aunt and uncle over for lunch. She served Beef Wellington – the problem was that of the five people at the table, three ended up dying within hours. She made the Wellington course with death cap mushrooms she had foraged and dried. She is now awaiting a jury’s decision about whether she deliberately killed the relatives or was it a culinary mistake? Listen to a report about the trial — the jury’s still out!—going on right now – on The Guardian Australia’s Full Story podcast here.
Recipe for Beef Wellington: Ingredients
1 (about 16-ounce) package frozen puff pastry, preferably all-butter, thawed in the refrigerator according to package directions
2 medium shallots, coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves (from 1/4 bunch)
1 pound cremini mushrooms, trimmed and halved (or quartered if large)
1 (about 2 1/2-pound) center-cut beef tenderloin roast
2 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt, divided
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
6 to 8 cold slices prosciutto (about 5 ounces)
1 large egg
All-purpose flour, for dusting
Flaky salt, for serving (optional)
The Wrongful Conviction of Leonard Peltier is a very good podcast series that features Peltier himself– who was recently released after serving 44 years in prison in the US. He was convicted of killing two FBI agents who were instigating conflict on the Pineridge reserve which he denies and which has proven to be a lie. Listen to it here.
Photo at the Top: A photo of part of the incredible display of the Terracotta Army, from 3rd C. China. Read more here. The museum is located outside the city of Xi’an, in Shaanxi Province, Northwest China.